11.22.08
The new Ozymandias
…or Ozymandias illustrated. Perfect.
Those who fail to learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.
Link
11.19.08
Health insurance companies willing to consider mandate
The health insurance industry has come out in favor of a mandate for the uninsured to buy insurance. They’re willing to work with the Obama administration on this, bringing their expertise into the negotiations. They’re even willing to extend coverage to everyone, even those with pre-existing conditions.
Let me guess. They’re going to accept people with pre-existing conditions, but they will find a way to deny these costs. Or the co-pay and deductible will still make it impossible for sick people to get health care whenever they need it.
Thr uninsured and the uninsurables will be required to buy at least the minimum policy being offered, and with the insurance companies writing the law, it will be neither cheap nor generous.
If the pool includes all the poor people currently uninsured, plus all those who are currently uninsurable, that’s a huge chunk of cash. Another way to say it is that this will be a huge chunk of wealth, and the insurance companies are salivating at the idea of getting Washington to redistribute that wealth directly from the lowest income people, with no influence in Washington, to them.
This will be a hefty tax on the uninsured and the uninsurables, the ones who can least afford it.
Why are they willing to enter negotiations? They’ve heard the phrase “single-payer”, and they’re scared to death. That’s literally scared to death, as it will mean the end of the money machine pumping our health care dollars into the black hole of American health insurance.
All I can say is, “Go to hell!”
11.16.08
Why they can’t just buy up the bad loans
They don’t exist.
Read about how all this came about:
And then read the details behind credit swaps.
It was all just an excuse to suck money out of the economy.
Fractured English
Who am I talking about? Sarah Palin, of course. In an blog post on the New York Times site, Dick Cavett, a man who knows how to turn a phrase, writes about Sarah Palin, a woman who appears to have no first language. She is a woman of many words, but unfortunately does not seem to be able to assemble them into coherent sentences. Just in case you didn’t notice.
Everybody has completely missed the point of her grammar. The “language” she is using only consists of syntactically correct sentences when she is reciting memorized talking points or speeches. When speaking extemporaneously in response to questions (real questions, that is), she appears to speak a mishmash of seemingly randomly-chosen words and phrases. It sounds like language, but it is not.
Like any good Pentecostal, she is speaking in tongues.
New York Times Special Edition
The other day a “special edition” of the New York Times dated July 4, 2009—a parody, actually—was printed and distributed in major cities. There was only good news to be seen: end of the wars, health care, etc. At the time I first got the link, the website—a perfect copy of the real NYT site— was not working. Later, only the front page worked, but now all the links are working, so enjoy!
Did you hear about the Priest who…?
Yeah, really. It sounds like the start of a dirty joke.
He told his parishioners that they couldn’t take communion anymore if they had voted for Obama.
This has been in a lot of blogs, but since I don’t watch television, I don’t know if it’s in the MSM. However, there’s been an update. The Monsignor in charge of that parish has sent out a letter repudiating that position, and the local parish took down their position statement from their website.
Someone who formerly attended that church says that the priest is a money-hungry sob who would do anything for earthly goods and glory. His goal is to build a cathedral for his parish.
You can read the comments if you want to go to the article, but there are a lot of them. I’m just going to quote the one I responded to (which is mostly quotations itself).
Delicatemonster said in a comment:
From Sojourner’s Magazine
When President Bush took office, the nation’s abortion rates were at a 24-year low, after a 17.4% decline during the 1990s. This was an average decrease of 1.7% per year, mostly during the latter part of the decade. (This data comes from Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life using the Guttmacher Institute’s studies).Enter George W. Bush in 2001. One would expect the abortion rate to continue its consistent course downward, if not plunge. Instead, the opposite happened.
I found three states that have posted multi-year statistics through 2003, and abortion rates have risen in all three: Kentucky’s increased by 3.2% from 2000 to 2003. Michigan’s increased by 11.3% from 2000 to 2003. Pennsylvania’s increased by 1.9% from 1999 to 2002. I found 13 additional states that reported statistics for 2001 and 2002. Eight states saw an increase in abortion rates (14.6% average increase), and five saw a decrease (4.3% average decrease).
Under President Bush, the decade-long trend of declining abortion rates appears to have reversed. Given the trends of the 1990s, 52,000 more abortions occurred in the United States in 2002 than would have been expected before this change of direction.
How could this be? I see three contributing factors:
First, two thirds of women who abort say they cannot afford a child (Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life Web site). In the past three years, unemployment rates increased half again. Not since Hoover had there been a net loss of jobs during a presidency until the current administration. Average real incomes decreased, and for seven years the minimum wage has not been raised to match inflation. With less income, many prospective mothers fear another mouth to feed.
Second, half of all women who abort say they do not have a reliable mate (Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life). Men who are jobless usually do not marry. Only three of the 16 states had more marriages in 2002 than in 2001, and in those states abortion rates decreased. In the 16 states overall, there were 16,392 fewer marriages than the year before, and 7,869 more abortions. As male unemployment increases, marriages fall and abortion rises.
Third, women worry about health care for themselves and their children. Since 5.2 million more people have no health insurance now than before this presidency - with women of childbearing age overrepresented in those 5.2 million - abortion increases.
The U.S. Catholic Bishops warned of this likely outcome if support for families with children was cut back. …
What does this tell us? Economic policy and abortion are not separate issues; they form one moral imperative. Rhetoric is hollow, mere tinkling brass, without health care, health insurance, jobs, child care, and a living wage. Pro-life in deed, not merely in word, means we need policies that provide jobs and health insurance and support for prospective mothers.
As I wrote in a blogpost to conservative Catholics,
If you want to keep abortions at their lowest possible level, vote for the candidate who will actually help the working poor to support their children–that only makes sense. That candidates name is not John McCain, who assumes an income just shy of five million is actually middle class, who rails vehemently against ’spreading the wealth’, and who thinks maintaining Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthiest one percent is just dandy; while arguing for a jury rigged healthcare system that would further burden the poor by actually taxing their health care benefits. Voting for a candidate who can actually attempt fairness in our tax codes and redistribution in some meaningful way is being truly ‘pro-life’ in its largest and most generous sense.DelicateMonster a slightly left of center reading experience
I wrote:
I would disagree with the idea that the effect of policies that disproportionately affect single mothers is incidental. I think it is intentional that they have the effect of permanently disadvantaging both the woman in this position and her children. The current administration has attempted to pass programs that give tax breaks to married couples, claiming that somehow these would be a disincentive to remain single, as though the only reason single mothers decided not to marry was because there weren’t enouogh punitive programs in place.
Bush has been trying to return women’s health to a biblical state. Preventing conception is going against god’s will, since god wants women who have sex outside of marriage to get caught and be forced to raise bastard children. Women whose lives are threatened by a problem pregnancy should be denied medical care and die, even if there is no hope for the life of the fetus.
The logical extension of this is that only the Christian Science health model (prayer-only) is really following the will of god in any medical case. Did god really want Sarah Palin to have all that plastic surgery to make her look more appealing to voters? I think not. That was definitely going against god’s will.
Health care for single women? Only if they can afford to pay in advance. But it’s perfectly acceptable for them to pay the taxes that subsidize health insurance for the employed.
It’s all part of the demonization of women in general that says that late term abortion is a huge problem, and many women currently choose to terminate healthy full term pregnancies on a whim. It says that women are child-like creatures who need to be told what to do, just like Sarah Palin and her followers who have been taught not to think, question or learn.
Sarah Palin does need to be told what to do, as her internal compass seems to be stuck on the same message from the campaign. I bet she’s gotten tons of advice on what to do, but she can’t learn from it. She saw so much “success” with that demagogue act that she’s going to go with it.
I’ll tell her what to do: Sarah, sit down and STFU.
Hmm, maybe I could start a petition drive on that…
11.07.08
Join forces to fight Waldemart
Fun political commentary takeoff on Harry Potter and Thriller.
Election stolen in Alaska?
It looks like the keystone kops running the election process in the state of Alaska stole it.
Now, after the results of the last election (clearly tampered with in several states) and the Republican voter suppression in the process of happening, I am not firmly convinced that there was not a “Diebold Effect” that Obama had to overcome by performing even better than predicted. But considering that the group that was most underrepresented in the polls—younger voters—is also his strongest supporter, this was possible.
The issue is that in order to steal an election so that it stays stolen, you have to make the results appear plausible. Irregularities stick out like a sore thumb. In the last two elections, there were widespread irregularities in Ohio, where Democratic precincts “voted” 100% (or even higher) Republican and Florida had to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of minority voters in order to get the results they wanted. These are just examples. The issue is that the losing candidates and their party (the Democratic party) decided not to make a stink, to be “conciliatory”, and the mainstream media decided to suppress it, although it was a fascinating read.
By tampering with the programs of voting machines or optical scanners, you can shave enough votes to have an effect in a close election, and it’s hard for anybody to be the wiser.
But in this election, the polls pretty much agreed with the results. So if that happened, it wasn’t enough to affect the result, and as yet we do not see irregularities.
Except in Alaska, where numerous precincts voted more than 100%, vote totals are way down from the previous election, even thought there was lots of enthusiasm for all races in the state, and the convicted felon Ted Stevens who looked like he was going lose big instead won big.
It was part of the plan for Stevens to win, then resign. Palin would run for his seat in the Senate. But that wouldn’t work out if his opponent failed.
How many Wasilla Faith Warriors (people from Palin’s apocalyptic cult—which has declared its intention of infiltrating the government and taking control from the godless) are managing local elections? Remember, these are people with such an intense faith in the Bible that they don’t see anything else as important. How else could she have no knowledge that Africa is not a country? She has tried to blame the release of this information by claiming that the people who said it are “small-minded and bitter”. Yes, bitter at having to work with her and her nasty personality. But she did not deny that she believed Africa was a country. She thought the question was unfair.
Context: When South Africa came up in discussion, she thought they were talking about the southern part of the country of Africa…
And in case you missed it, she has no understanding of science, either. She believes that dinosaurs walked the earth with humans 6000 years ago.
But getting back to the Alaska “election results”, it is incompetent people like her that would pull such a blatantly transparent election theft, people she has undoubtedly appointed at all levels, also those who have been working to get themselves elected locally. They think God wants them to win by any means. No laws apply to them. The only thing that matters is not getting caught.
They just couldn’t figure out how to make it look like it was a fair election. They didn’t think it mattered, because these are people who do not see this country as you and I do, to steal a quote from Sarah. And they just can’t imagine how people like us think.
